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Topic: witch hunt against robots (Read 4713 times)

"Friday, March 2, will be a day of civil disobedience and direct action against the war machine in Pittsburgh. The main action will be an attempt to barricade the National Robotics Engineering Center, a branch of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) that develops robotic vehicles and weapons delivery systems for the U.S. Army and Marines."

ok so it isnt really a witch hunt, but more a protest against military research . . .

but it could be a precursor to a robot witchhunt . . . interesting that its probably the first protest against robot development, and that its located near CMU . . .

and more from the article:"Why CMU and NREC? CMU is one of the largest academic military contractors in the country. Many of the software guidance systems, general communications networking systems, and some of the robotics technology used in Iraq were developed at CMU. And through the efforts of its National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) -- which receives most of its funding from the Pentagon -- it has become the world leader in warfare robotics. Among other monstrosities, it is building is the "Gladiator" Tactical Unmanned Ground Vehicle, a remote controlled robo-tank designed for urban warfare."

reading further into it, it appears their entire protest is misguided by a total lack of knowledge of how battlefield robots operate:

"... when robots make decisions about who can and should be killed we remove the last vestiges of humanity in the battlefield. However intelligent an AI system like Gladiator might be, it clearly lacks the ability to make moral judgments."

Plus, as a member of the CMU robotics community, I know for a fact that CMU doesnt have "a mindset that glorifies military power, hardware and technology as its primary problem-solving tools." The robotics institute has an overwhelming majority of civilian use research, and students know what they are working on (duh).

I think it's legit that folks are trying to raise awareness of the path we're headed down in enabling autonomous agents to kill people by attaching weapons to them, though I personally don't know how we will avoid the inevitability of this occurrence. I fully support the efforts (funded by military) to develop bomb disposal, mine detection, rescue, and even remote monitoring technologies, but when I see the videos of UAV's with weapons carrying live ammo, I get a really sick feeling. Perhaps there's a line that can be drawn, though no doubt, someone will cross it.

"...a lot of japanese anime has people in the future attacking robots like some form of twisted racism . . . perhaps this is the beginning . . ."

I agree that this is mostly pop culture paranoia. It's ashame that protests like these started out to prevent militarise from eveloping a scorched earth policy but now are focused on the wild tangents of "what if...". The futrue of the world being ruled by 'Skynet' is not possible because we are the machines masters; if we do not want the mean old computer to take over every nuclear missile in the world then all we have to do is unplug its modem and laugh. I know that someone reading this is going to think up some what if scenario that might involve some rouge virus in this situation taking over the world but to them I say you've missed the point. The solution here is simple STOP FIGHTING!!!, but then again if we were to do that we might have to focus our attention on a more difficult task like curing cancer .

Hehe, readme (a satire newsletter written by CMU students) actually had an article about robots protesting against humans.. That was a great article. It had a picture almost like the one above, but with robots (think C3PO, R2D2, Asimo and other robots holding signs). Pity I don't have it anymore or I'd scan a copy to put online..

Oh wow, I didn't realize it was so big.. That explains why it took Acrobat so long to open it last night.. Lemme just take a picture of that article then.. haha

Here it is (taken from CMU's readme):

The full article, if you're interested, is here: http://somchaya.intuios.com/temp/robot.jpg. I didn't link the picture directly because the forum shrinks it down and you won't be able to read the text. So if you want to read it, open the picture in your browser